The best bad argument against same-sex marriage
Same-sex marriage is a big deal in New York — and here in the North Country. Thanks in large part to pressure from the Roman Catholic church, our state legislature is likely to lag in the move to legalize gay marriage.
Meanwhile, the issue has emerged as a permanent issue in our region’s Assembly and Congressional races. Dede Scozzafava was drummed out of last year’s special election in large part because she supports marriage rights.
Janet Duprey, the Republican assemblywoman from Plattsburgh, drew a primary challenger this year in large measure because she also supports the change.
(So, too, does Willsboro Assemblywoman Teresa Sayward.)
I revisit this issue because a recent column in the New York Times offered what I consider to be the best stab at arguing that gay marriage is somehow wrong, or that it cheapens heterosexual marriages like my own.
Columnist Russ Douthat first acknowledges that “traditional” marriage is anything but traditional.
The norm historically as well as biologically has been a kind of polygamy, with marriages still often serving as a form of social or political contract in many parts of the world.
Nor is lifelong heterosexual monogamy obviously natural in the way that most Americans understand the term.
If “natural” is defined to mean “congruent with our biological instincts,” it’s arguably one of the more unnatural arrangements imaginable.
So if gay marriage doesn’t violate long-standing cultural traditions — or some sort of biological “natural law,” as some have argued — why oppose it?
This is where Douthat begins his heavy lift and the cracks in his argument begin to show.
First, he asserts that heterosexual marriage is “a particular vision of marriage, rooted in a particular tradition, that establishes a particular sexual ideal.”
I think this is true enough, so long as we acknowledge (Douthat doesn’t) that a) this ideal is rarely fulfilled, and b) the ideal isn’t shared by everyone, not by a long shot.
Divorce is the norm in the United States and studies show that even many of the couples who remain in wedlock til death do them part have affairs or occasional infidelities.
What’s more, fewer and fewer Americans come from “a particular tradition.”
We come from kabillions of different traditions, ranging from a wide array of Christian sects (some embracing gay marriage) to a disinterest in religion.
(As I’ve written here before, “non-religious” is the fastest growing type of “faith group” in the US.)
To his credit, Douthat does concede that roughly half of Americans think gay marriage is fine, which means that banning it isn’t in fact our “ideal.”
But he fails to tip his hat to another key fact: A lot of us don’t see marriage in any form as the desirable norm. Thirty percent of women in New York have never tied the knot.
Still, with all these caveats, it’s fair to acknowledge that for a lot of Americans “traditional” marriage is the goal that they strive for, for themselves and their children.
Sadly, here’s where Douthat’s “best-bad” argument completely falls apart.
He goes on to claim that the chief virtue of marriage is that “lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.”
To drive the point home, he adds that “if we just accept this shift [to gay marriage], we’re giving up on one of the great ideas of Western civilization: the celebration of lifelong heterosexual monogamy as a unique and indispensable estate.”
That ideal is still worth honoring, and still worth striving to preserve. And preserving it ultimately requires some public acknowledgment that heterosexual unions and gay relationships are different: similar in emotional commitment, but distinct both in their challenges and their potential fruit.
Most of this is hoo-ha.
Firstly, the idea that through any part of human history, one-man-one-woman heterosexual marriages have been a “microcosm of civilization” is discounted by the first half of Douthat’s essay, in which he acknowledges that this simply isn’t historically true.
Which leaves him with the old stand-by that heterosexual marriage is better because of the “organic connection between generations” — meaning, of course, that men and women can have babies.
Anyone even remotely conversant with human nature — or the Bible, for that matter — knows that the ability to procreate has never produced moral, civilized or even particularly Christian behavior.
People treat each other with decency, respect and long-term commitment because we nurture and teach one-another to respect those values. Not because we have the biological capacity to reproduce.
It’s also hokum to suggest that good heterosexual marriages require “some public acknowledgment that heterosexual unions and gay relationships are different.”
My marriage is pretty great and I have absolutely zero interest the public acknowledging the fact. Nor, in order to justify my marriage, do I need to be assured that it is “a unique and indispensable estate.”
What Douthat misses is the happy fact that this particular culture war debate doesn’t resemble the abortion battle, which really is a zero-sum situation.
In that fight, someone wins and someone loses. It’s either a woman’s right to choose, or it’s a murdered baby; there’s no middle ground.
But with marriage, it doesn’t work like that.
I am a married heterosexual man (my 15th anniversary was last week!) who has never been divorced and never had an affair, and I am surrounded by similarly long-term committed married gay couples.
It turns out we can all have exactly what we want, just by embracing the idea of marriage and fidelity, and then by leaving each other the heck alone.
So what’s left if it it turns out that gay marriage doesn’t hurt anyone or anything?
At the core of his essay is a very real sense of grievance on the part of people who see their society changing rapidly, with one ideal (marriage) being redefined because of the influence of another ideal (tolerance).
Douthat captures that anxiety, that sense of nostalgia, fear and sadness eloquently. Unfortunately, he tries to wrap his emotion in an argument that doesn’t make sense.
Tags: glbt
What place does gov’t and the courts have in marriage in the first place? Why do we need marriage licenses? Why are there tax penalties against married people?
Seems to me there’s a much larger question at hand here.
Just because people act the way they do doesn’t mean they are doing the best thing. The argument that I am doing what is right for me is like walking with blinders on. The issue is their world view, what a person hangs one’s hat on, what steers them. Inside the box the world may be cozy and that box may be their own wants and feelings.
Brian:
Another well-written piece on an important subject.
Belated happy anniversary greetings!
I say do away with marriage entirely.
I read the Douthat article simply because there was nothing else that seemed worth reading on the editorial page that day. After the first few sentences, all my eyes read were bla bla bla bla.
“Why do we need a marriage license?” Completely off the topic but an easy question to answer You don’t. I suspect there are hundreds of thousands of people living as common law husband and wife.
Marriage licenses allow for a couple of things. In my view, the most important is prevention of venereal disease, or at least control of the disease. We had to show our marriage license to the health insurance company before we were eligible for spousal benefits, so I assume the insurance companies find marriage certificates useful. I’m guessing gay couples have a difficult time getting spousal benefits. Next, and I don’t know how well this is done, is to insure the person you are marrying isn’t already married.
But there is a more important reason coming down the pike. You will need a marriage license as a step to insure that your children will be eligible for USA citizenship.
Outlaw marriage and you solve the problem. Let churches issue their own license and then they can choose who gets them. Debate over, if this church won’t let you get married, go down the road and find one that will.
The main problem with this debate is that it conflates two separate commitments, one legal and the other spiritual. The resolution resides in seeing them as separate and distinct issues.
“Why do we need marriage licenses?” This is the legal part, the part that the government is legitimately concerned with, a contract between two individuals to live together and share resources, a non-business kind of partnership. It defines the obligations of that partnership in the event of dispute or dissolution.
The other commitment is a spiritual one, a commitment to love and cherish, to lend mutual support above and beyond any legal requirement, to put the other person first in our priorities. A commitment of this scope is a moral one, not a legal one.
Although we historically tend to see the two as one, we can (and do) have either without the other. There have always been both “marriages of convenience” and couples who just choose to live together without benefit of a marriage license or ceremony.
The path out of the current debate is to clarify the two and get government out of “marriage”. Government’s role should be to regulate civil unions, regardless of gender and marriage should be left to religion. Everyone who wants the legal benefits of marriage would get a certificate of civil union from the government. Those who want “marriage”would get that spiritual recognition through their church, temple, mosque or whatever. If your religion refuses recognize your union as marriage it is time to re-examine your religious affiliation. In a diverse society which holds separation of church and state as one of its core principles, it is not appropriate to expect our government to arbitrate it.
My problem with the whole debate is that two opposite sex people who don’t even know each other can legally be married but two people of the same sex who are committed to each other cannot.
I think the people “defending marriage” could be more productive by donating the millions of dollars they throw away fight same-sex marriage to a marriage counciling services for those who cannot afford them.
FWIW My wife and I never got a marriage license. We were married in Quebec and (at that time, it may have changed) we had “the bans” read in both our churches for three Sundays prior to the wedding. The bans are basically the part of the marriage ceremony which says “if anyone knows a reason these two people should not be joined in marriage…”. No one spoke up, we were married and the government(s) accepted it as legal without any blood test or license. So other models are out there and do work. BTW In 8 days it will be 44 years together.
I think the easiest way out of this mess is for the government to issue “civil union licenses” in place of “marriage licenses” and with the same legal ramifications, and let everyone call it whatever they want to call it.
I must comment on Pnelba who says, “We had to show our marriage license to the health insurance company before we were eligible for spousal benefits, so I assume the insurance companies find marriage certificates useful.”
Insurance companies find everything useful in their never ending attempt to get your money but not pay out when you try to make a claim.
Insurance companies, bankers and lawyers, who often share the same bed, are bigger crooks than any drug dealer.
To James Bullard in 8:48 post … HEAR, HEAR! Well said. My feelings precisely and I, too, have 40+ years of heterosexual marriage going for me. Nice job if you can get it but live and let live. Separate the two issues, civil and religious, and call it a day. It is NOT a zero-sum game.
Brian,
A large part of the problem facing advocates of same-sex marriage is in redefining of the word marriage. The overwhelming number of Americans are simply not post-modernists. Whether it’s be because of religious traditions, religious-political institutions working in concert, culture or whatever, in the Western tradition there’s a commonly accepted definition of marriage. It may only be a thousand years or so old (maybe less for all I know) but it’s been one man one woman.
I believe that most people do not want anyone discriminated against. Maybe I’m being naive but that’s what I believe. Extending legal & civil benefits, whatever they might be, to gay and lesbian couples is just. I don’t believe there’s a single good reason to deny benefits to same-sex couples. However, the advocates for same-sex unions are not happy calling the committed relationships of same-sex couples ‘civil unions’ or any other term short of the word marriage. My question has always been if marriage is redefined to include same-sex couples, why should plural marriage be outlawed? For that matter, why should marriage have to involve only humans? [Absurd – but worth the thought.] This is the problem with post-modernistic redefinitions – words become meaningless.
As I see it, the second issue with the same sex marriage debate is the effort of consciousness raising. Many people with strong opinions against same-sex marriages have thought long and hard about their positions but they are viewed & described as intolerant, closed-minded, homophobic, and etc. Perhaps some people opposed to same-sex marriage are, however, what galls me is the extent to which those favoring such unions are intolerant of those that have different opinions. Diversity is ok, as long as you agree with us. Some of the opposition to same-sex marriage rests w/the tactics/ strategy of the advocates to elevate the consciousness of the Neanderthals that “cling to their beliefs”.
Judging from the comments so far there’s agreement that gay & lesbian couples should be afforded all legal rights but there’s opposition to recasting the meaning of the word marriage.
JDM: Clearing the definition of any word is not set in stone (as anyone who listens to A Way With Words on NCPR knows!) I hate the argument that this would “redefine the word”. Its just a word. One definition in my dictionary is “an intimate or close union”. The word is often used to describe close unions between things that have nothing to do with people getting married.
A marriage means a husband and a wife, so it does redefine what the word means to have two men, who is the wife? However that is probably okay I think the damage that this debate does is worse than the damage (which does exist) of redefining marriage to take into account a particular sexual practices.
As I have watched this debate unfold over the past 10 years I have changed how I feel. Gay marriage is already here, it exists in Iowa it exists in Canada it exists in Mass. for me I would say let’s just do it and move on with the understanding that many Christian Churches will continue to marry only marry one man and a women and will continue to teach what our ancient scriptures say about sexual purity and family. The key will be if this religious liberty is respected, I doubt that it will be.
Brian,
I don’t understand why the Catholic Church opposes civil gay marriage? They do not recognize any civil marriage even if it is between a man and a woman. I as a catholic am not recognized by the church as married even though my wife and I were married in a Jewish ceremony 15 years ago. So why the Catholic Church is involved confuses me?
Hi Paul,
The Catholic Church recognizes my marriage and I was not married in a Catholic Church I was married in a Southern Baptist one, but my wife and I both converted after we were married to the Roman Catholic Church so I am not sure what is going on with your situation?
I think there are some reasons for the opposition, I just find them weak compared to the damage the debate is already having on society. The problem is in my opinion is that we heterosexuals have already made such a mess of traditional marriage that any objections to homosexual marriage being non-traditional ring pretty hollow. As a Christian I would rather work to reduce divorce and fight against some of the more depressing and materialistic arguments made in the OP, things like monogamy being unnatural or the idea that faithful marriage is almost impossible or already gone, both of which are false for example.
mervel,
how is the debate itself over gay marriage causing any damage to society?
Let’s be honest. The real push/pull in this debate is not really about same sex marriage. It is about same sex sex. Those who are against same sex marriage know, at least for the time being, they aren’t going to be able to reinstate laws against same sex sex. What they are doing is trying to draw a line in the sand with same sex marriage.
Speaking of the Catholic Church. As far has its laws are concerned, it is a mortal sin to engage in any kind of sex outside of marriage. Period. No distinction between same sex or opposite sex or self sex. If it is not between a man and woman who are married and who are open to having a child, it is a mortal sin.
Ho-hum, more evidence that organized religion creates more problems than it solves.
Hi hermit,
The debate itself I think is a waste of energy and it tears people apart that don’t need to be torn apart for marginal reasons. Yes I am marginally against the notion of gay marriage for a variety of reasons, but since we already have a pretty decadent culture I don’t see the difference and in fact see some marginal benefits in the state granting gay marriage licenses. Of course now I am hearing that gay marriage would be “different” with less emphasis on fidelity and sexual faithfulness.
Knuckelhead yes ho hum, I believe organized religion is one of the few institutions holding what is left of our culture together but we are so far apart on that it is not even worth talking about.
Pete I basically agree I think what is happening is that people see the general breakdown of society through divorce, fornication, promiscuity, sexual perversion and so forth and think this debate can somehow be a line in the sand which is not it is a losing battle that people are arguing about for no reason.
As an aside, they are moral teachings not “laws” but you are correct Christian teaching (not just Catholic) holds that all sex outside of marriage is sin, there are some exceptions but the VAST majority of Christians hold this as truth as do Muslims and Orthodox Jews.
The last place I would go for moral teaching is the Catholic church or many of these other “Christian” organizations that cannot practice what they teach.
Mervel, I appreciate the role that religion plays for some, but didn’t the human race survive for tens of thousands of years without any of the current big religions?
Sorry for the Spiritual sideline.
PNE yes I totally agree. No one should go to any Church or Mosque just to receive moral teachings. The only reason to go is that you actually believe the faith itself is Truth. I am a Catholic not for their fine moral teachings or because I am in love with some of these characters that call themselves Catholic Clergy, I belong because I believe that the Truth of God is worshiped there and it is what God is calling me to do.
Your point is well taken however and is one of the reasons this debate in my opinion should be left alone for now by my Church.
Peace to you.
It is very difficult to explain the Catholic religion to most people, including most Catholics.
First and most importantly, the Church teaches that all, including the Church and all its priests, including the Pope, are sinners.
Forget the doctrine of Infallibility. It was used only once for a very particular reason and will probably never be used again. Too complicated to try to explain here. Many theologians wish it had never been invoked.
Second, the Church has a major problem very similar to the Supreme Court. While the Supreme Court has only had a little more than 200 years of being run by some of the best lawyers and thinkers of our time, the Catholic Church has had 2,000 years of being run by some of the best (and worst) theologians (lawyers) of all time. To put it bluntly, it gets bogged down in legal precedent. It paints itself into corners which are very difficult to get out of, even when it knows it should.
To use a phrase in common use today, it’s complicated.
Nice post, Brian, though you needn’t deconstruct Douthat. He’s got real issues when it comes to the ickiness of sex. He’s particlularly eskeered of, as he puts it, “a chunkier Reese Witherspoon”:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/03/fear-of-reese-witherspoon-look-alikes-on-the-pill.html
TMI, Mr. Douthat. TMI.
A good essay. Thanks Brian. And the comments here are thoughtful too. Here are a couple of facts to add people might find of interest:
– legal ‘marriage’ was invented by the royal families of europe to control wealth, property and power….it was (is?) a contractural thing not a religious thing
– some 25% of gay and lesbien couples have children living at home (I don’t know what the % is for straight couples)
– In Argentina (which just approved same-sex marriage nationally, supported by 70% approval in national polls) everyone goes to a government marriage office, does a short ceremony and signs papers. Then, if wanted, they can have a religious ceremony but it has no legal standing.
I offer these just as some observations. My personal view is that our gov’t grants so many priviliges (rights?) to married people…like tax free inheritance of property, pensions and social security to widows, immigration rights, some 1000-1200 items, that to deny these to lifelong gay partners just doesn’t seem fair…a point quite aside from all the moralizing. We should be do better than that. Marry who you love.
Hi Knucklehead,
You know that would be a great discussion.